by Idwal Jones
All day he sat at his window, rotund and placid, looking at the pageant of life in the streets, the trees, the children at play, the shiny green busses rolling off to the country which he had not visited in thirty years. He scratched notes, read in large books, and wrote grocery catalogues for firms like Felix Potin.
The world being what it is, logic can be illogical at times, but none the worse for that. A group of Radicals, whose café was in the next street, called upon M. Lambert, to ask him if he would write them a leaflet. He received them coldly, as befitted a Royalist.
“I am, Messieurs, a philosopher, not a hurler of bombs.”
“Exactly,” said the spokesman. “We should like some philosophical leaflets. No crude phrasing, you understand. We want some fine literature for a change.”
“Like the Encyclopedia?”
“Precisely that!”
Lambert sat down and wrote one off, stiffly, in the manner of a fashionable doctor writing a prescription for a mule’s hoof. They were grateful. They paid him two hundred francs. It was a learned bit of writing, and nobody could make head or tail of it. That night Lambert polished up his best stick, went out and dined well.
Through an oversight in the matter of a license, the distributors got pinched, the leaflets were confiscated and hauled to the warehouse.
Months later, the Arrondissement decided to send out notices. Improvements were to be voted on—new pavements and a storm drain. A clerk, one of those pin-saving bureaucrats, was reminded of a lot of paper on hand, and thrift would counsel its use. So the leaflets—with M. Lambert’s detached and logical exposition that concealed dynamite—were hauled out and imprinted on the reverse. Postmen delivered ten thousand to homes of every shade of political thought. There was a great rumpus over this afterwards, when it was too late. The upshot of it was that ten Syndicalists were voted into office. M. Lambert got all the praise, to his horror. He was supposed to have engineered the coup. A Machiavelli.
The Royalists called upon him, with a delegation from the Friends of the King. Would he contrive that again for the opposition?
“Impossible! We’d all go to jail.”
“Well, then, would Monsieur write a monthly pamphlet for us?”
“That remains to be seen.”
“Would eight thousand francs a year be a visible sum?”
It was. And between articles on zoology, plants, and Augustan ruins, M. Lambert beat the drum in his lucid and scholarly style for the cause of the Bourbons. It made no difference at the forum, where anything at the Elysée or even across the street (another Quarter) might as well be happening in China. Thereafter our Mayor lived in ease.
It was not until winter that our paths crossed, and then in a way he never suspected. For weeks I had misjudged him; thought him a sprite or an erratic, up to secret mischief. I was convinced that somebody on this floor had somehow found egress to my room when I was away at the Faisan d’Or. Half a dozen times, when opening the lower drawer of my dressing table to take out my linen, I found a handful of cheese rinds and lettuce leaves inside a ring of collars. Cantal cheese rinds.
It was either a jest, I thought, or the caprice of a senile yet diabolical mind. I put a new lock on the door. But the apports, as table rappers call them, still appeared. Though disturbed, not for anything would I have charged the philosopher, immersed to his neck in speculations on zoology and ruins, a mild, shy Silenus, too deeply absorbed even to scrape up a greeting as we passed on the stairs, with playing so weird a caprice upon me. No, I had not the courage.
One night, being unable to sleep, I lay reading a book, and I became aware of a movement in the room. An invisible hand might have been shaking the canvas. It was a white shape, gliding up. It slid into a hole in the ceiling. I flung myself at the bureau, looked into the drawer, and there again was a piece of rind. Not the philosopher, but a snow-white rat was the miscreant. The next day I poked into the ceiling a crust dipped in arsenic and glued a paper over the hole.
I had acted on impulse, and in a very little while I was sorry. It seemed a shabby way to treat a small creature that had done me no harm with its pranks, that had only wanted to make a nest somewhere, and that had gone to endless trouble to drag rinds and leaves through that wilderness of rafters overhead, gone down the canvas and up along the leg of the bureau into the drawer. It may, besides, have been someone’s pet. I had killed it.
Somewhere, either along the Quay or at the Bird Market, I bought a white rat, a tamed one, with a black face, and after taking out the crust I turned her loose among the rafters, and thus made my amende honorable. For many nights I heard it scutter overhead, exploring its new world, making itself at home; then all was quiet, and I supposed it had tired and strayed elsewhere.
Before long I was introduced by the pork butcher to “our Mayor,” and it became my habit to drop in one or two evenings a week. The Mayor knew more about food than I did. He had written a book on spices, and he dug it out from a pile of volumes so tumbled over and chaotic that he had to crawl through a tunnel of them to drag it out. He was very proud of the section on cloves, drawn from his wanderings in Zanzibar, whence comes most of that spice. Almost half the yield goes to the Dutch East Indies, where it goes into Kreteke cigarettes.
“From Zanzibar we went on to Madagascar,” he said, sprawling in his chair with feet on a stool. “Myself and a lad of my age. We shipped on as cabin boys. Only one passenger aboard, and that was enough. The Tartar! He was the new military Governor. Nothing we did pleased him. He had the English vice of eating boiled eggs for breakfast, but they had to be fresh. We had only ten hens aboard, all too miserable to lay when we got into rough sea.
“So one morning we chipped a tiny hole at the end of an egg, dropped into it one of his shirt studs, then, after boiling, smoothed it over with wax. His stupor when he beheld his shirt stud in a spoonful of white was ample reward for our trouble. He bolted to the Captain with the egg—the Captain, mind you—and the two of them marched to the afterdeck to stare at that bewitched crate of poultry, trying to figure out which hen it was that had violated the established order regarding eggs.”
The Mayor had an uncommon mind. He was a humanist with a boundless curiosity. Nothing human, nor extra-human, was alien to him. He had dug for Priam’s treasure with Schliemann in Greece, and journeyed through Egypt, looking for some rare kind of mummy, with Virchow. One long shelf in his room just about sagged with pots and dog-headed jars of such age and rarity that the Louvre would have envied him.
We were sipping wine one night, when my eye espied in the corner a brass cage with a little Eiffel Tower in it, and a treadmill. Two white rats were looking at me, one perfectly white, the other with a black mask. I started.
“Ah, you have not yet seen my pets?” beamed Monsieur Lambert. He took up a cheese rind, and with it playfully scratched their backs. “This is Scaramouche, and that is Fadette.
“They are the closest friends I have in the world. I adore them. But Fadette—there is the fickle one! Once she vanished for two weeks, leaving her mate home to keep the family virtues bright while she cut up somewhere—the trull! She came back timorously. He repulsed her, even bit her on the ear.
“She has forgiven him, I think. The strange thing is that she returned a shade lighter—the ghost of herself with a black face. Change in hair coloring is not infrequent in the species, but in only two weeks’ time—interesting, is it not?”
I could only nod, and feel criminal.
X
FRANÇOIS LE GRAND
In the old priory days the vaulted niche in the kitchen of the Faisan d’Or had sheltered an altar. Two granite steps led one up to it from the kitchen. Inside were a long table with a carafe of wine and a few chairs, and here the chefs rested when they could leave their stoves. I recall it now with nostalgia, this club—the vista from it into the smoke-filled aisle, as from a box at an opera. The white-capped artists; the shuttling camionettes piled high with dishes; Sidi, the giant Senegalese dishwasher, ete
rnally spitting cardamom seeds through teeth like flagstones; Pless, the sommelier, like a scarab in his coat of gold-and-emerald; and the waiters, who had the faces of croupiers, most of them, or of men grown hard in finance or politics. Often they paused to buzz-buzz into each other’s ears—eyebrows uplifted as if pinned, foreheads in wrinkles, like lines ploughed in ivory.
Pless was a good friend of ours, his temperament inclining him to the cooks. He was a ponderous, mild Alsatian who kept usually to his wine cave, smoking a pipe and carving bushels of peach stones into intaglios of adorable little nudities. Sidi wore a double necklace of them underneath his shirt, and a pair on his watch fob.
The sommelier kept our carafe filled, and not always with vin ordinaire. The wines that François, the roast chef, and I sipped in this niche! Hessians; some gracious Moselles; once a Johannisberger from a world of pomp and ceremonial, with the dark blue seal, the highest in the Archangelic hierarchy of Cabinet wines; and again a Hermitage, perfumed amber and liqueurish, far older than the oldest chef in the Faisan d’Or. Pless salvaged these for us from the diplomatic feasts waited upon by Pierre.
François, a dwarf-like Attila, and fully as strong—he could balance a whole beef on his head and walk off with it—drank these wines in sips, squatted deep in his chair, with tongue rolling and resounding “Ah’s!” He was a Breton who had passed his youth in Louisiana, and gained for himself the sobriquet of “the Creole.”
The wine finished, he rolled cigarettes of fine Smyrna tobacco, like pine needles, and smoked with one eye upon the joints turning at his fire bank opposite, the flames licking and sputtering in a sullen conflagration. To François a roast was a joint roasted against an open fire, not devitalized in an iron box of an oven, and called, properly, funeral baked meats.
“Charcoal fumes shorten our lives,” once declaimed a kitchen immortal, “but what matters that if we but add luster to our name and glory?” François breathed no fumes (he usually looked on from the niche), and glory he valued less than a fig. Perhaps it was because he already had it; he basked in the admiration of the kitchen, since those in the craft knew that he was one of the great inventive chefs of the world. Who else knew it? Perhaps nobody. The widest renowns being seldom the reward of superior merit, the virtuosi pass through life undiscerned save by the elect.
François’ taste was impeccable. His verdict in wine, for he had a divination into the nature of that mysterious living entity, even Urbain regarded as final. He was perhaps unduly severe toward the cooks who failed to create miracles with their materials. This was understandable, for he thought them blackguards or assassins.
François, the broad-shouldered gnome, with his vast white bonnet, his hauteur, his imperial beard, who strutted with a fork as big as a Neptune’s trident, was my favorite after Guido left.
“Jean-Marie,” he would say, “come with me to the morgue.”
So down he would go to the meat vaults. François had a sort of tunnel at the end of the icebox, coal-black and moist, where game hung, and long cuts of fillet wrapped in cheesecloth. He would pull open the door, mumble into the darkness, and smack his lips. You could see nothing there but glows of phosphorescence.
“See! Fireworks! A little more blue over the fillets, and they’re ready to scream, ‘Eat me’!”
Even lower in the scale than unskillful cooks he ranked persons who were ignorant of what they ate.
One autumn the spokesmen of three Powers, upon whose decision hung the destiny of the world—so precariously is our planet balanced—met at a town on the Riviera, and there they were to drink Madeira, dine, and talk for a whole week. Their names I have forgotten. From Paris were dispatched, by gracious assent of the Faisan d’Or, Messrs. Pless and François to look after all but the Treaty itself.
All went smoothly until the close of the second day. François roasted for the dinner half a young antelope. Had it been fed on fern shoots, grass, and reeds, it would have been perfect; but that dry summer in the Tyrol it had fed overlong on apple twigs and herbage that was papery rather than lush. François was distressed.
The solution was to serve it not with salt alone but with an Espagnol sauce. In a great saucepan he fried meat and bones of beef, veal and ham, with onions, celery, carrots, turnips, fines herbes, cloves, allspice, cannel, and pepper. Then he put in the thick roux, then poultry carcasses and tomatoes. It is a tedious sauce to make—a long task and involved. After two hours he put in sherry.
François tasted it. What did it lack? He had a palate for flavors as some have an ear for music. Aha, coriander!
Since all was prepared except the dessert—a soufflé of pineapple to be ovened at the last minute—he went out, mounted upon a Foreign Minister’s bicycle, and pedalled into the cool air in quest of the herb which wearied the Israelites so extremely in their manna that they sighed for the fleshpots and fish of Egypt. The shops had none of it. He rode on, sniffing past many little gardens and calling out to all the old ladies sitting on their doorsteps. He bought some at last, a handful, and stuck it in his hat and pedalled home.
He went straight to that saucepan in the kitchen, and found it empty! His senses almost left him. He braced himself and walked into the dining hall.
“François,” a minister plenipotentiary called out, “this is a soup finer, much finer, than any we ever tasted before.”
François drew himself up with such dignity that he seemed two feet higher than his four feet nine. His voice shook with emotion.
“That, Messieurs, was an Espagnol sauce—still incomplete.”
He bowed himself out, pedalled to the station, and caught the train for Paris.
“Long before anyone else,” said Pless, “François knew that conference was doomed to failure.”
—
François’ tastes were aristocratic. He lived in a stuffy flat near the Luxembourg Gardens, clogged with books on history and gastronomics, paintings of generals and court ladies, music boxes, embroideries, and birds in cages. We used to sit in the Gardens and talk, or listen to the band brassily attacking operatic airs. He was fond of music, still unsated after a long but congenial exile in the Louisiana bayous, where his father had a tavern.
There were still celebrities in the Luxembourg. He pointed out Charles Maurras for me, and a journalist or two of the staff of L’Action Française. This corner was a haunt of the Royalists: the old ladies in shabby black, knitting under the foliage of the plane trees, and the elderly mustachios reading politics, or engaged in grave discussion as they walked up and down the paths. François himself, in his broad velour hat and frock coat, was both Royalist and celebrity.
He went little to the theater now; nothing he could see was as fine as what he had seen, except the Molière plays at the Odéon. As for the chefs—
“Gone narrow,” he shrugged. “Unrivalled in their narrow field, yes, but beyond it—what? Too often they are trained as pastry cooks. They become not interpreters but scientists, chained to a rigid formula, like those unhappy Hindu bridegrooms wedded to trees.
“I have known British chefs—a few, mind you, no more than two or three—who were great eclectics. Did they not live in the hub of Empire, the hub of many spokes—Colonial, African, English folk cookery, and the Indian, which is Persian, Rajput, and ancient Greek and Palmyran—so that when a dish of it, wrought in honor and joyfulness, is placed before a man, he will be the richer for having dined on the art and history and poetry of fifty centuries.
“And those chefs also knew much of the Continental, and of the American, with its Deep South—unknown terrain to most of America—where flourish the turtle fricassee, orange-fed turkeys, gumbo z’herbes, crayfish bisque, marsh ducks en estofade, peppers à la Mme. Begué, crabs without chemise, and pompano cooked in a paper hat as large as a nun’s.
“Even so, the North of America has its consolations. There and nowhere else must one turn for a lemon pie, or a chowder—Breton, though its ancestor was, the chaudière of the fishing boats. Only Maine and anglicize
d Quebec know how to bake the white bean. For a crockful of it, if famished on a cold winter night, I would barter all the flageolets in Provence.
“I, my young friend, am tolerance itself, and I exult in merit wherever found. Perfection may strike anywhere—like a bolt of lightning! And the man struck need not always be a Gaul! Whoever he is, he must also pay the price of perfection, which is narrowness. Balzac wrote good novels, but was an indifferent cook, for all his infatuation with the kitchen.
“As cooks, we French may have less scope, but what we are brought up to know, that we know supremely well. I often wish I could adventure a trifle at the Faisan d’Or, at least to the extent of preparing an Oyster Florentine—but what fulminations should I try! I would be run out of the premises as a traitor! Out with the coquin who says an oyster can be eaten cooked as well as raw. He shows a lack of confidence in our national ideals! He thumbs his nose at the sacred Tricolor!
“Of foreigners we are wary, and distrustful; though, in the kitchen, not of Italians. Italy, as the world knows, is the one country with the inward conviction that art is really supreme.”
In such vein talked François, my mentor, who had traversed oceans, and in the voyaging lost not a grain of his native virtue. He talked with hands flying, stick hooked on a thumb—the kobold eloquent, his voice a massive basso. He paused, and sniffed.
“Aha, we are coming to the Rue Mouffetard! Somewhere about here is a bottle!”
The nose that had inhaled the scent of magnolias and the tepid, odorous breath of the Louisiana bayous never led him wrongly in the alleys of Paris. Into the Rue Mouffetard we entered. Its air sparkled with frost under a chill and blue December sky. A week of mild heat and nights of plumping rain in Brittany had garnished the stalls with the splendor of early vegetables: hampers of endives, truffles, mushrooms, and cress; a plenitude of herbs; and crates of geese so fat that ancient kitcheners, leaning on sticks, dewdrop on nose and coat collars turned up, gazed at them lost in dreams. They might have strayed into the Land of Cockaigne.